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“There is no brain activity.” None of us are doctors, but I knew when my friend said it that he was trying his best to manage the right amount of information about the situation, etiquette, and brevity. We’re in the waiting room. Our friend is in the intensive care unit.

I’ve never looked at a loved one on a hospital bed in this state, fighting for life. I took a moment to be with him alone. I brought him a baseball. We call brand new, white baseballs “pearls”. It was a pearl. He’ll need something to fiddle with when he wakes up, though it’d be a medical miracle.

What I’m about to say next will either be profound, incredibly insensitive, or both. Nonetheless, it’s the reason for me sharing this tragic story, so here it goes.

I stood there alone with my friend looking over him. Life support was doing its work. I had to believe he was working even harder. I told him that and cheered his effort. In that moment, I was struck with two realizations:

This is a living nightmare, and

Everything is OK.

The compelling notion that my second observation is offensive or insensitive might be dead on. I’m open to that. Yet, I thought that it was beautiful to feel in what would be the worst case scenario for us all that, still, everything was OK. My dear friend was OK. In that moment, his future was particularly uncertain, but in that exact moment he was OK. I was OK, too. I have to believe that when the moment comes it will be OK if he doesn’t wake up and that it will also be OK if he does. After all, this moment seemed as dire as I could imagine, yet there he was. He was peacefully OK. I could never have anticipated feeling that emotion. I was scared and sad and cried, but I expected all of those. I didn’t expect for everything to be OK, too.

I believe it’s an incredibly powerful perspective to try on that says even in the worst cases imaginable we’ll still be OK. Furthermore, I don’t think this thought loses importance whether I’m right about the whole thing or not.